Oppose US imperialist war drive!

The following statement was released Aug. 3 by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, and Osborne Hart, SWP candidate for vice president.

The drums of war beat loudly at the conventions of the two parties of capitalist rule—the Democrats and Republicans. With belligerent speeches and chants of “USA,” they gave a glimpse of the future they offer: more devastating wars abroad to shore up the interests of U.S. imperialism. Just in the last week, the Obama administration has sent additional “counterterrorism” troops into Afghanistan and launched a new bombing campaign in Libya.

The Socialist Workers Party calls for immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces from the Mideast and North Africa. This is in the interest of the international working class.

Look at the bloody record of the last quarter-century of Washington’s wars and military operations—under Republican and Democratic administrations alike—from the first Gulf War in 1991, to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Yemen, Libya, Syria and more. The human toll includes tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, and millions displaced.

The toll includes Washington’s cannon fodder—working people in uniform—killed, maimed and treated with callous disregard for their medical needs when they return.

The U.S. rulers have shown they will use any means to maintain power. Washington dropped atomic bombs on Japan 71 years ago this month. The Socialist Workers Party called this an act of “deliberate and cold-blooded extermination.” Successive administrations have come within a hair’s breadth of unleashing nuclear weapons against China, Iran, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq.

The Obama administration has launched a $1 trillion program to modernize its deadly nuclear arsenal—a clear signal the rulers are prepared to use these weapons—and is provocatively placing anti-missile systems closer to the borders of Russia and China.

Democrat Clinton claims her Republican rival Trump “is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” In fact, working people can trust none of the capitalist parties or politicians. The very workings of their imperialist system—which is in a historic crisis that they are incapable of resolving—fuels trade rivalry and political instability. This will spark more wars. As long as nuclear weapons exist these wars increase the danger they will be used. And any use of nukes poses the risk of nuclear annihilation.

The Socialist Workers Party calls for Washington to immediately and unilaterally dismantle all its nuclear weapons.

The only way to end the rulers’ profit-driven drive to war and the threat of nuclear devastation is to end the dictatorship of capital and replace it with a workers and farmers government.

The working class needs no nuclear weapons, as Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro explained in 2005. Revolutionary Cuba has “never considered producing nuclear weapons because we don’t need them,” he said. “We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear ones … the invincible power of moral weapons.”

This is the course the Socialist Workers Party is fighting for—a world without war and exploitation, a world organized by workers and farmers based on human solidarity, not the dog-eat-dog values of capitalism. Join us!

Related articles:
‘2016 US election campaign: Three parties and two classes’
Socialist Workers Party event opens new stage of campaigning
‘I’m glad you’re here campaigning for SWP’
Campaign with the Socialist Workers Party
Socialist Workers Party campaign launches $30,000 fund!
Lessons of US bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki
Call for unilateral US disarmament remains key for working class today

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home